1. These tasks were performed in chronological order:
A. Literature review, Institute introduction, Ethics application
B. Experimental design, Stimuli recording
C. Babylab establishment, Testing environment setup, Hardware and software setup
D. Protocol setup, Infant recruitment, Data collection
E. Data Analysis
F. Experimental Report in manuscripts, workshops, conferences and public dissemination
Note: The pandemic greatly affected project data collection as travelling of both participants and experimenter become difficult.
Regardless, significant data have been collected with the help of the host organization.
2. Results overview
A. Direct to the project, our major preliminary findings are:
- Infants are sensitive to cross-cultural facial expressions in the first year of life. They can tell the differences in emotions expressed between Norwegian and Japanese mothers.
- Infants prefer happy facial expressions from their native culture, exhibiting a familiarity effect. Infants also prefer angry facial expressions from a foreign culture, exhibiting a novelty effect.
- Infants can match language with emotions. They prefer Norwegian emotions when Norwegian language is displayed, and Japanese emotions when Japanese language is displayed.
- Infants from bilingual and bicultural backgrounds show different preferential looking patterns from their monolingual peers.
B. Indirect to the project, I have conducted work in these areas:
- Bilingualism – I further explored research in bilingualism and published articles in this area.
- Infant development – I studied infant cognitive development from an angle different from emotion perception but following the same overarching principle in infant and early childhood development, on how experience shapes infant gender-specific toy preferences.
- International collaborations – I have worked and am working with researchers across the globe on numerous infant research projects.
3 Results exploitation and dissemination
A. During the project:
- Four articles were published or accepted on well-known journals (e.g. Infancy, Developmental Science).
- Four conference proceedings were published.
- Two book chapters and one editorial article were published.
- Two colloquium presentations were given before the pandemic at University of Stockholm and Fudan University, respectively.
- I was also invited to present at three institutes, including Thammasat University, Western Sydney university and University of Oslo.
- Twelve conference presentations were conducted (e.g. Society for the Neurobiology of Language).
B. After the project:
- Three journal articles are currently under review or revision. Seven more articles and one book are in preparation apart from the upcoming publications of the current project.
- Three talks have been scheduled for academic and dissemination purposes, one of which will be offline (Early Literacy Conference, Sydney, Australia) and the other two online (Summer schools, Potsdam, Germany).
- Results will also be disseminated in the unit Psychology: Behavioural Science I plan to coordinate in the section of developmental psychology.
